Keeping Carp out of the Great Lakes.

Six months ago U.S. Geological Survey scientists noted that the Chicago region is the greatest contributor of nutrients to the Dead Zone In the Gulf of Mexico. I wrote about how that came to be. When canal builders excavated the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848, they cut through the low divide that separates drainage [...]

Conservation Buffers, Water Quality, and the Dead Zone

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it regulated sewage produced in our houses and businesses. It did not regulate water that washes off our streets and farm fields. What washes off our farm fields in the Midwest ends up in the Gulf of Mexico.  Freshwater is lighter than salt water. When it [...]

It’s June and the Dead Zone

Every June the U.S. Geological Survey predicts the size of the Dead Zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The Dead Zone is a hypoxic zone in the gulf, the place where levels of oxygen drop so low that it becomes inhospitable to fish and shellfish.
Hypoxia happens naturally every summer, when the Mississippi pours its [...]

Chicago a Major Contributor to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey discovered that the Chicago watershed delivers the most nitrogen and phosphorus to the Mississippi and hence to the Gulf of Mexico, where it fertilizes algae blooms that suck up the oxygen and creates a Dead Zone.
“We could go with ease to Florida in a bark and by very easy [...]

Ecosystems as Infrastructure–The Stimulus Bill

I am so glad to find I am wrong. There is money in the stimulus bill for the Upper Mississippi Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, $8,604,000 to be exact.
The stimulus bill will fund first phases of construction of new 1,200-foot locks on the first five dams north of St. Louis. It will implement small-scale navigation aids, [...]

Dead Zone

Whale Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico
During the Flood of 2008 tons of nutrients and fertilizers washed off midwestern farm fields and into the Mississippi River, which carried it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it nourished algae blooms and the growth of plankton.
This is an annual occurrence. 
Commercial fishing crews first began sighting whale sharks [...]

Measuring Water Quality–Upper Mississippi River, East Channel, Prairie du Chein, Wisconsin

East Channel: Prairie du Chien
Crawford County, Wisconsin

 
 
 
 
“In the Upper Mississippi, half-buried in silt and sand, are scattered congregations of naiad mussels. They are simple creatures, little more than two strong shells or ‘valves’ enclosing a soft, formless body. Blind and virtually brainless, they lie on the river bottom with shells agape, laved in the [...]

The Flood of 2008–The Dead Zone

In the Spring of 2008 it rained and rained just as Midwest farmers had fertilized their fields with nitrogen-based fertilizers. The rain washed the fertilizers into streams that flow to the Mississippi, which carried them to the Gulf of Mexico. 
When the nitrate-laden freshwater from the Mississippi, lighter than the Gulf’s saltwater, reaches the Gulf, it [...]